DeWayne Wickham: Are Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy for real?

I'm not going to join the howling mass of critics who've taken seriously the words that Donald Sterling and Jayson Bullock are said to have uttered - not as long as Quentin Tarantino is still making movies.

Sterling, as by now you must know, is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who allegedly was captured on audiotape spewing the kind of racist thoughts that saturated Django Unchained, Tarantino's recent, irreverent film.

Bullock, a black Army veteran, is a volunteer bodyguard for Cliven Bundy, a white Nevada rancher who was propelled into the news recently when he and a band of armed supporters had a standoff with federal agents over his illegal use of government land.

Can't you see Tarantino's fingerprints on these stories? I do.

When Bullock said he was willing to take a bullet for Bundy, I immediately thought of Stephen, the trusted house slave in Django who died defending his bigoted master. Bundy's bigotry surfaced when he went off script at a news conference to tell the world what he knows about "the Negro."

Blacks, who he said are basically on government subsidy, "abort their children (and) put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton." And Bundy said this has caused him to wonder whether blacks today would be "better off as slaves."

In a taped rant, Sterling, the billionaire, seems to be berating his girlfriend (V. Stiviano, who is black and Latino) for publicly associating with blacks. "Why are you taking pictures with minorities? ? It's like talking to an enemy." Then when the woman asks whether it bothers him that she posts pictures of herself with black people on Instagram, the man responds with the matter-of-fact racism of the slave owner in the Tarantino movie. "Yeah, it bothers me lot that you want to broadcast that you are associating with black people. You're supposed to be a delicate white, or a delicate Latina girl."

As much as this recording, which Sterling has yet to say isn't his voice, makes him sound unbelievably stupid, CNN's interview with Bullock also leaves me wondering whether the global news network has been Punk'd by Tarantino.

Bundy's standoff with federal agents made him the darling of the Republican right wing and Tea Party fringe. But when the rancher went from big government opponent to a national-news-making racist, many of his political supporters headed for the exits.

Even so, Bullock stood his ground. He not only defended the father of 14 who leached off of federal land for two decades to feed his cattle - and, by extension, his family; he also found no irony or fault in Bundy for calling blacks government freeloaders?

Those are the kind of enragingly complicated characters that Tarantino is well known for creating.

Even Bundy's suggestion that blacks would be better off picking cotton, Bullock defended. Bundy simply meant blacks would benefit more from doing honest work "instead of going out and being a criminal, being a degenerate, things like that," Bullock told CNN.

Unimaginable, right?

That's why all of this stuff with Bundy and Sterling must be episodes for a reality show that Tarantino is secretly producing - ones in which the lives of some really sick people are used to imitate some equally disturbing art. There's no other way to explain Bullock's response to Bundy's racism - or Sterling's racially venomous words to his girlfriend.

Now if only the filmmaker would let us in on the joke.

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DeWayne Wickham: Are Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy for real?

I'm not going to join the howling mass of critics who've taken seriously the words that Donald Sterling and Jayson Bullock are said to have uttered ? not as long as Quentin Tarantino is still making